Label: Recital – R116
Format: Vinyl, LP
Country: US
Released: 31 Oct 2025
Genre: Non-Music, Classical
Style: Field Recording, Musique Concrète, Experimental, Minimal
Casual classical collides with fragments of everyday life from NYC composer and Reading Group label head Derek Baron for Recital. A table for one please at The Holy Restaurant.
A musical scrapbook both diaristic and digressive, Baron’s world is assembled through fragments of improvisations, half-baked ideas, musical mistakes and recordings of typical day-to-day banalities. Although through genius use of juxtaposition, the whole thing comes to life. In a world where nothing makes sense, Baron fabricates new realities. It’s an abrupt and tangential slideshow that captures, recognises and intensifies the mundanities of rural America - the happy/sad interviews with a family-run casket company are beautifully reinforced with lugubrious strings whilst a rogue guitar solo wails over cosy, melancholic keys leading to a sense of hilarious bemusement. At times the music is arrestingly beautiful, brief vignettes appear out of the fog before a brash mid-western radio skit takes over, lending a fly-on-the-wall documentary quality to the piece, echoing the strangely familiar yet surreal world of filmmaker John Wilson. You could have heard these sounds before, but now stitched together in a seemingly casual way creates a whole new story, recalling American greats such as Blue Gene Tyranny and Ernest Hood, or even some of the great Lambkin / Lescalleet combos. Seriously, I haven’t enjoyed a record more than this all year. (Mint / New - with big printed booklet - shops pls ask for wholesale).
Tracklist
1. Intro 01:44
2. Oven Girls
3. Lottery
4. Hover!
5. Palisades
6. b2
7. The Wounded Hussar
8. Trace 3
9. Gamers 03:06
10. Flattery
11. Music in the Casket
12. Our Lady of the Mississippi
13. The Holy Restaurant
14. Closing Trace
